Body Snatchers (1993) - Well, THIS Got Scarier With Time

Welcome back. You're just in time for a fresh round of pods.

Now, you WILL remember to keep these properly watered in your rooms, right?

Look, I'm just concerned is all. I'm still seeing some emotions and I think these plants could help.

...wait. Let me try that again.

ANYWAY, we're jumping ahead in time, this time by fifteen years. It's a new generation and a new kind of Body Snatcher, this time with a new title, and a new director in the form of Abel Ferrara (which was weird for me to remember coming in this time with memories of Bad Lieutenant and Ms. 45.)

There IS still a fair amount of unsettling nonsexual nudity
but nothing quite on the level of Harvey Keitel's breakdown scene.

As an evolution of story, Body Snatchers differs considerably from either of the two prior movies. The pod people are still there, and function in much the same way as in the previous versions, but that is about it. In this case, the medical examiner hero of the past two movies is now a secondary, with the movie instead focusing on his daughter (played by a young Gabrielle Anwar) as the family is moved out to investigate strange goings-on an army base.

If you haven't figured out where it goes from there, well...I don't know what to tell you except keep taking care of those plants. It'll be over soon.

As I've said a few times now, one of the things that's fascinating about this series is how its core idea is adaptable, able to change itself to fit the themes and fears of whenever it is made, whether by design or simple happenstance.

In this case - well, welcome to a post Gulf War brand of pod people.

With that in mind, as some of you have already likely picked up on – Ferrara's decision to set the movie on an army base is a major part of where this movie is going thematically. This is probably the most thematically pointed of the four takes on the story produced to date – by the time Marti (Anwar) and her family arrive at the base, the pods have already taken over much of the populace. Thanks to the tendency of military culture to lean heavily on conformity, this change in the social structure isn't registered right away. Much of it is simply treated as standard army culture rather than an indication of shed humanity.

Okay, so it's not particularly subtle, but then no rule stated it had to be. For what it's worth though, Ferrara mostly conveys it well. At times it can be a little too on the nose (such as a sequence involving Marti's little brother in school where the students' art projects are all the exact same drawing) but even then, it doesn't feel like the movie slows to beat you over the head with it.

One other area where this particular version stands out – while not as uniquely grim as its 78 predecessor, Body Snatchers is arguably the entry in the series that could be described as the most overtly horror-based. Much more time is spent on sequences of people being taken over by pods – up to and including seeing the fate of a human fully taken over within the first act, a reveal previously kept till near the ending. It's understandable in some ways – by this point, the concept of the pod person was already a part of our cultural lexicon, so Ferrara didn't have to play it as coy, the audience already knew what it was getting into.

To its credit, the quick cut presentation of the scene still
makes for a pretty unsettling first reveal, even if you
know what's coming.

This more open approach to the creature and body horror leads to arguably the movie's strongest sequence – an extended scene in which soldier Tim (Billy Wirth), feigning being a pod, has to work his way through an army hospital that has been turned into a conversion center. Ferrara keeps the focus predominantly on Tim and the occasional looks at what he sees, and all the while we hear sounds of soldiers screaming as they're restrained and sedated or the sick, wet sounds of bodies collapsing as they're fully taken over. It manages to be both blatant but also careful enough to make sure it doesn't over play any one visual, creating an altogether disturbing tableau, made all the more effective by the extra challenge that Tim is required to keep a straight face through all of it.

Following this fairly nightmarish scene, we get an ending that is, to this point, probably the closest thing to an upbeat end (give or take for the studio mandated ending to 56, that is.) Of course, even that ending is laced with heavy ambiguity that the pods have already outpaced the survivors, and it's only a matter of time before they escape from one threat into another.

A threat that, in this version, makes the idea of sleeping
even MORE unsettling.

Overall, Ferrara's take remains an interesting one. There's no denying it's a movie with something to say, even if it's at times a bit too blunt about what it's saying, but it also still keeps its story moving, even while it's making sure you don't miss the point. The end result isn't quite as to-the-bone unsettling as its predecessor, but it still manages a fair number of unsettling jolts all on its own.

I still don't know if I can agree with Roger Ebert's assessment that this was the best of the three. In fact, as it is now, I think I'd put it third in line – though less from any fault of its own and more just preference for the first two in their approach. Even with that placing, this still works well as a fresh take.

Also, given what followed the 90s, a dark commentary on the enforced conformity of military culture, particularly with an emphasis on the threat of it eventually working its way off base and weaving its way among civilians as well that feels uncomfortably prescient, so it's got that going for it.

Three for three so far and each has been enjoyable experiences, with something unique to say for them.

Now comes...well...we'll get to The Invasion next time.

With a comment like that, I suppose I've already tipped my hand about what I thought about it, huh?

Well, you'll get to hear me explain that more next time.

ARE YOU ASLEEP YET?
JUST CHECKING

Till then.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – It's the End of the World As We Know It (You Won't Feel a Thing)

Welcome back fellow humans. I trust you've all been tending to your gardens?

Getting lots of rest?

Good. Very good. Keep at it!

With that, it's back into the green house for cultivating another batch of pods for this year's Halloween run.

In what might be the biggest timeline jump I've done so far (give or take for how you want to read last year's segue into the extended universe of The Thing), we're jumping 22 years ahead from where Don Siegel left the town of Santa Mira, CA to its alien fate.

This time around, the baton went to Philip Kaufman – who saw this as an opportunity not to simply remake the original (which he has gone on record as being a fan of) but rather to make a variation on a theme.

Something about the desolate landscape on this poster just feels
incredibly appropriate given the tone the movie leans into.

Which is an interesting way to put it, given his version has, for many, become the definitive variation of the series – so much so that his version of the pod person has become the one ingrained into the popular culture, most famously in the image of them pointing and shrieking to identify those not yet turned.

Like its predecessor, this is an entry I was having a hard time deciding how to approach at first. One part because I've already discussed it on here back in the day, and one part because so much has already been said for it.

What's been said has been justified, of course. Over 40 years later, this movie still works well. True, some of the aesthetic is a bit dated, but that is pretty unavoidable. Once you adjust to that, the movie still plays very well as a thriller, slowly building its paranoia and taking that early time to let you grow to become invested in the small group of characters caught up in the growing menace.

Speaking of that slow burn, that's actually the aspect I wanted to focus on this time. Like The Thing last year, this is a movie I've revisited many times over the years, so for this, rather than just do to a general overview, I was challenging myself to stick to a single particular facet of the movie.

Tangential to where I'm going with this, I will die on the hill
that these versions of the pods are the most visually unsettling.

In trying to do that, it finally hit me just how well Kaufman builds that menace into the movie from the get-go. Some of it's easy to see up front – like the first movie, we have the numerous people who know something is wrong, but can't put their finger on what (there's definitely a social commentary aspect to the fact the first characters we see picking up on it are women and minorities who ultimately go ignored) – and that's by design to help bait the hook.

Then there's the parts that aren't as readily apparent to a first time viewer – things like the scene early on when Brooke Adams unknowingly picks one of the pods. Naturally, our focus is on her, but it's also hard not to pick up on the conversation going on around her, as children are led out to the garden by their teachers, encouraged to pick flowers to bring home to their parents. Once you know what's coming, it seems obvious, but watched in a vacuum, it plays as fairly benign.

Particularly compared to its later accompanying, and far darker, moment when a group of school children are being led into a building where they're being told it's time to take naps. By the time that scene occurs, we know the grim fate that awaits the kids far better than we do in that first moment, but revisiting that first moment becomes much darker in that regard in hindsight.

Given the larger scale this movie builds on compared to the
predecessor, I find myself subscribing to the fan theory that
Kaufman made a sequel where that bookend never happened
and Bennell's been on the run for years.

The same goes for the recurring scenes of the waste removal trucks. It's one of those aspects that reads as fairly benign on that first watch in a vacuum, then takes on a whole new tone on the revisit – particularly when you look in the hopper and note there is no other garbage in that mixture other than the almost literal ashes of the human race.

Dread is a tricky formula to get right in a movie – it's easy to risk laying it on too thick and showing your hand, or couching too much in mystery that loses its value on a rewatch. Kaufman strikes a good balance here, with many of the smaller clues becoming much grimmer horrors filling in the margins on later viewings, more fully painting in the picture of what rapidly becomes clear is a larger destruction of humanity unfolding around our unknowing heroes.

The result is a feeling that, having now seen every entry in the series, feels ultimately unique to this movie. It's the one Body Snatchers film I would say manages to feel genuinely apocalyptic. There's others that flirt with that line with ambiguity, but no other entry sounds the death knell for the human race with as much certainty as this one does, and given how much of it is baked into the movie from the start, it really pays off in the final minutes of the movie – it's possible Veronica Cartwright isn't the last human left on the planet, or in the city, but for our purposes, she may as well be. And as such, it's hard not to sympathize and share in her terror as that knowledge hits home with one last alien shriek.

On that note - we as a society don't give Veronica Cartwright
nearly enough credit as an actress. This would have been an
easy scene to botch and she nails it - both in the initial shock
and horror as well as that subsequent moment where it looks
as though the last of her sanity has just snapped realizing
this is the end.

Which brings us to a close for another entry.

It will be a little less than twenty years before the next entry – though our own visit to Abel Ferrara's The Body Snatchers will be in considerably less time. Until then, stay safe, and keep watering those plants.

No reason. They just look nice, that's all.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

 It begins!

Welcome back to another October run at the Third Row. As discussed last time, this year the series of choice is that evergreen (no pun intended) sci-fi thriller staple, the Body Snatchers series. Further, as the title suggests, we're kicking things off today with the one that started it all (cinematically, anyway. Regrettably I hadn't gotten around to tracking down the original novel in a timely fashion for this one.)

It had been years since I really sat down and gave this a proper watch. In fact, I think the last time I saw it in its entirety before this was back when I wrote about it for the '31 days, 31 horror movies' formula. I haven't actually looked back at that entry because I wanted to go into this just off of the current impressions.

There's a particular aspect of this movie I want to get into, as it was one thing that struck me more on this viewing than it has in the past. But before I really dig into that, I just want to sound off on the movie on its own merits first.

So, I'll admit it as I'm writing this - I've looked at this poster many
times over the years. And this is the first time in all
of that I've really actually thought about, and got,
the significance of that handprint on it.

Having said that, this is still a very strong movie in its own right. It's one that sometimes tends to get overlooked given how large a shadow is (deservedly) cast by its successor, but it is still a movie well worth seeing in its own right. Siegel's version plays itself as a bit more low-key compared to what comes later, partly the benefit that comes from being the first in line and not having an audience that has a sense of what to expect (and whether you've seen the movies or not, the idea of a pod person is now pretty common knowledge thanks to pop cultural osmosis.)

The one area where the version can be said to stumble on its own merits is with regards to the movie's book-ending – a decision mandated by the studios to give the movie a more definitive ending.  
The first part isn't particularly troubling, for the larger movie – though, again, the knowledge it imbues the movie with does undercut the movie's slow reveal by giving you something to expect.

"Come on, guys! I'm not saying we have to spoil the entire movie!
How about just a little tease of what's coming, huh?
Just a little to let the audience get interested?"

The bigger problem comes with the movie's epilogue, an ending that feels very tacked on to give the movie a happier conclusion. In adding this in, the studio's undercut the original ending scene, where an utterly terrified Kevin McCarthy (who has already given a good performance prior to this scene, but knocks it out of the park here) frantically tries to warn others of the invasion he knows is coming, ending on his haunted expression as he shouts, both to the drivers and the audience, “YOU'RE NEXT!"  It's a genuinely great scene – and a good cap on McCarthy's performance – that loses a lot of its bite with the studio-mandated finale appending it.

If you only get to watching just one movie from this run, 78 is probably the best bet, but I'd be lying if I said 56 wasn't well worth your time just as a general watch (though again, feel free to consider skipping past the opening and ending – it won't be perfect as there is still narration, but you'll at least get the genuinely effective final scene as Siegel intended it.)

One of the more curious side effects I've accepted from living in 2020:
The realization that if I somehow travel backwards in time, this is
how I will probably come across to anyone I meet.

Before I conclude, there is one other thing I do want to go into – it's something that will be touched on with the other movies as well, but is of particular interest for me in the context of this first movie.

As I said last time, and alluded to above, Body Snatchers is a fascinating property because it's one that consistently speaks to the times it's made in. Even when all the versions have the same core concept, the differences in culture at the times of each new version give them an incredibly different feel.

This stands out even more given that this first attempt was a movie that was, as far as most of the people involved were concerned, apolitical. Per interviews with many of the people involved (among them  McCarthy, movie's scriptwriter and the author of the original novel the movie was based on) they all simply saw this movie as being a straightforward sci-fi thriller with no real undertone to it.

Despite that intention, the movie was soon made into a rallying point by people on both sides of the political spectrum – with reads of the movie being both anti-Communist and anti-McCarthy in its presentation. Of the people involved in the making of the movie, director Don Siegel was the only person who really acknowledged a political factor going in – and even to hear him tell it, it was less a conscious effort, and more an acknowledgment that the paranoia sparked by Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts was going to make its way into the film whether they wanted it to or not.

"It's...it's either reading Karl Marx or naming names to the HUAC.
Depends which the audience finds scarier, but it's one of the two!"

In an age where people have debated the idea of politics in pop culture and horror specifically (an oftentimes disingenuous argument that ignores the subtext of many earlier classics of the genre), the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers remains one of the more interesting examples to bring up – it wasn't designed to be political, but it became that way just by sparking the right ideas at the right time.

Ideas that, to the movie's credit, still resonate now (watching the scenes of Santa Mira's children talking about how their older relatives have changed but never quite being able to explain it has a certain extra degree of haunting familiarity after you hear enough stories of people who've become estranged from loved ones that went down the rabbit holes of pundits, conspiracy theories, or oftentimes both.)

Again, I will be the first to admit, the 1978 Body Snatchers will likely always remain the gold standard of this property. Having said that, I'm pleased to see that the 56 still carries itself well now and still manages to feel like it has something to say for itself even now.

Pretty impressive for a movie that didn't feel like it was trying to make a statement at the time.

So far, so good. And if you're not sick of me singing the praises of the remake, check back here soon when we jumped ahead to the Philip Kaufman movie that solidified this series as pop culture shorthand.

Till then, this is your resident huma—Guy in the Third Row reminding you to take care of your plants and get lots and lots of sleep.

In closing, I would like to thank the Santa Mira Farmer's Market
for sponsoring this series - bring some pods home for the whole family.
No reason. They just might like them.

Can't Sleep, Pods Will Eat Me

Ahhh, I love this time of year. The air's cool and crisp, the leaves are changing, and, of course, the opportunity to bury myself face-first in horror and inhale deeply.

With that odd visual in your minds, welcome back to the Third Row, the site that has currently taken the status of 'annual curse', lying dormant until October, when it rises again to ramble across the earth.

2020 has been...let's just say it, cause we're all in it - it's been a shitshow. I've toyed with bringing this back in other forms throughout the year with mixed results, but in any event, I remain committed to the current October model.

For those who are just joining us this year, here's the rundown – way back in my younger, slightly more free timed days, this month took the practice of '31 days, 31 movies' as its model. It was fun, but the time does add up. A few years back, I decided I wanted to get back on the horse, but changed the model – picking a single horror franchise and doing a month-long deep dive on it. In past years, this has taken us through the Phantasm series, The Omen, and John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy (more thematic than franchise, but I'll happily take an excuse to talk about my loves of The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness.)

This year, I'm again testing the boundaries of the word 'franchise.' Like last year, the installments are all standalone, united under a common theme, but a much more direct one.

By now, many of you have likely guessed by the title of this piece – this year it's Body Snatchers time.

In other news, my attempts at herb gardening during lockdown
this year have gone hideously awry.

I'll admit it – I'm pretty psyched for this particular series run. A big part of that is the fact that, at it's core, the horror of the Body Snatchers is one that is fairly evergreen, and one that, as this dive will show, can be readily reinvented and retooled to sync up with any number of other real fears depending when it is made.

So keep an eye out here throughout this month. Things will be kicking off proper with the 1956 Don Siegel classic soon, followed by Philip Kaufman's iconic 1978 remake, then Abel Ferrara's fairly creepy 1993 offering, and coming to a finish with the 2000s remake.

Give or take for time, there will be some bonus content as well (alas, no wild Dark Horse tie-in comic this year that I'm aware of), but that will depend on how things shape up.

In the meantime, will be back here soon. Everyone, stay safe out there.

And oh yes,get lots of sleep.
No reason. Just something we humans all need.